Monday, March 26, 2012

Debate on Oil Prices Overlooks the Elephant in the Room

By Joel A. Huberman

I was inspired to write this essay
when I read the Viewpoints section in the Sunday edition of The Buffalo News on February 12, 2012.
The News had recruited two “experts”
to answer the question, “Should [the] U.S. remove restrictions on oil
drilling?” One expert, Andrew P. Morriss, replied “Yes”,
while the other expert, Michael E. Kraft, responded “No”.
Although both men discussed important concerns (the factors affecting oil
prices, the need for conservation, the importance of producing energy locally
rather than in politically and militarily unstable foreign regions, etc.), both
of them completely missed what seems to me to be the major issue—the elephant in the room.

That elephant is the carbon dioxide
(CO2) that we release when we burn fossil fuels (oil, gas, and coal) and the
global warming, ocean acidification, and other disastrous consequences of that
CO2.

I think most readers of this essay
are already familiar with many of the predicted effects of continued fossil
fuel burning. I’ll mention just a few—melting of glaciers, melting of polar ice
caps, frequent heat waves and frequent and prolonged droughts, frequent storms
and floods, submersion of coastal cities and farms as sea levels rise, and
combined warming and acidification of our lakes and oceans.

All readers of this essay living in
the eastern two-thirds of the United States are currently experiencing or have
recently experienced abnormally high temperatures. I’m writing this essay on
March 21, 2012, in the middle of a period of unusually high temperatures (70s
to low 80s, in mid-March, in Buffalo, NY), which has been going on for nearly two
weeks straight. This has never happened before in my lifetime, and I’m 71 years
old. According to Jeff Masters, the founder of Weather Underground, in his blog
for March 17, 2012,
Minneapolis, MN, was 39°F above its average, and Bismarck, ND was 41° above its
average for the preceding day, March 16. What will happen if summer temperatures in the American
midwest approach 40°F above average? Answer: many Americans will die.

Speaking of the American midwest, if
global warming continues at its present pace, our midwest and most of our west
are likely to become deserts within the next 50 years. According to a recent study by Aiguo Dai of the National
Center for Atmospheric Research (available here),
the map below shows the measured pattern of dryness and wetness across the USA
in the decade 2000-2009 (which does not include last year’s severe Texas
drought). To
interpret this map, one needs the color scale below it and the corresponding quantitative indicators of drought
potential (“Palmer
Drought Severity Index” measurements). Values less than -4
are considered indicators of severe drought potential.

Thus, even in the first decade of
the 21st century (2000-2009), the American midwest and west were rather dry. But what might the future bring if we keep burning fossil fuels and warming the planet?

The drought potential of the 2000-2009 decade is nothing compared to what Dai’s study predicts for the fourth decade
(2030-2039, just 20 years into the future) if we continue burning fossil fuels
at current rates:

By the seventh decade (2060-2069),
just 50 years ahead of us, drought potential in our west and midwest will be
catastrophic:

Where
will our food come from?

Clearly the consequences of
continuing to burn fossil fuels dramatically outweigh the consequences of
changes in the price of oil that might be brought about by opening up, or not
opening up, more public lands to oil drilling. Why is it that the experts
debating the issue of oil prices and oil drilling in The Buffalo News couldn’t see—or saw but failed to comment on—the
HUGE elephant in the room?

I think it’s likely that the
apparent ignorance of the experts, and the failure of The Buffalo News to recognize their serious omission, was an
understandable (though not pardonable) consequence of the largely successful
campaign by fossil-fuel-industry-funded “climate deniers” to confuse both the
mass media and the public by casting doubt on the validity of climate
scientists’ warnings about global warming. A recent book by climate scientist
Michael Mann, The Hockey Stick and the
Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, describes ways in which
climate deniers have succeeded in making their lies part of our mainstream
culture. Mann was and is a major target of the climate deniers. He knows what
he’s talking about.

I hope that everyone reading this
article who is not yet convinced that fossil fuel burning is warming the planet
will study Mann’s book. In that book, such readers will discover the extent to
which they have been misled by unscientific and unethical “climate deniers”.

The message of the climate
scientists is clear: if we are to have any hope of restraining the warming
already underway to a tolerable level, we need to stop burning fossil fuels as
soon as possible. Of course, it’s not possible to stop pumping or digging
fossil fuels out of the ground immediately—we need time to reduce our overall
energy needs by conservation and to put in place an alternative energy
structure based on renewable sources—but what we can do immediately is prohibit the opening of new wells and new
mines anywhere on the Earth’s surface. By refusing to drill and refusing to
dig, we won’t bring about the immediate cessation of fossil fuel use that would
be most desirable, but we will accomplish a steady, non-disruptive decline in
their use that will give us time to introduce renewable energy sources at an
achievable rate. The goal of any discussion regarding any form of fossil fuels
should not be how to exploit that fuel for maximum short-term profit but how to
wean ourselves away from use of that fossil fuel as rapidly as possible.